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U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein speaks on a plan to curb global warming at a luncheon for U.C. Berkeley's Institute of the Environment International Workshop presented by Boalt Hall at U.C. ... more

2007-06-29 04:00:00 PDT Washington -- A lethal combination of lack of government credibility, a lame-duck president, fractures in both parties and an electric undercurrent of hostility to illegal foreigners decisively ended for at least two years, and possibly much longer, any effort to offer a path to citizenship to the estimated 12 million people living illegally in the United States.

Even if a new president and a new Congress choose to dive headlong into one of the most emotional and complex issues in American politics, they may face by 2009 not 12 million but 14 million people, a population the size of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago combined.

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The problem will be nowhere more acute than in California, which has more illegal immigrants, an estimated 2.5 million, than any state, and whose leading industries -- high technology and agriculture -- rely disproportionately on foreign labor.

"This is a new dynamic that we're in now, and it's hard to tell where people are going to go," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who helped negotiate the Senate legislation. "We lost, and what a loss does in this world where there's such an abyss between the sides, no one knows."

The bill also would have imposed a broad-ranging new worksite enforcement regime, further fortified the border, provided visas for future workers, eliminated a 4.5 million backlog of family migrants, and moved to a merit-based immigration system. It failed 46-53, short even of a majority, and 14 votes below the 60 needed to go to final passage. Most Republicans, newly elected conservative Democrats such as Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana and Jim Webb of Virginia, and a handful of populist, pro-union Democrats killed the bill once and for all.

The debate in its final days had a rancor seldom seen even in matters of war. Supporters complained of racist hate mail. Majority leader Harry Reid said a caller from his tiny hometown of Searchlight, Nev., told him he should enter a witness protection program.

A vivid rift between Southern conservatives and Northern liberals touched the rawest nerves of American history. A knot of Southern Republicans -- Sens. David Vitter of Louisiana, Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Jim DeMint of South Carolina -- rose again and again on the floor to block action.

"This immigration bill has become a war between the American people and their government," DeMint said.

Vitter hotly denied that the fight cast Southern Republicans in the mold of Southern Democratic segregationists of the 1960s.

"Eighty percent of the American people were against this bill," he said. "For anybody to suggest that was about racism, I think itself is the height of ugliness and arrogance."

Latino and other ethnic groups were championed by Sen. Edward Kennedy, who began his 40-year career shepherding the 1965 immigration law to passage as a coda to the Civil Rights Act.

Over and over, Kennedy compared the legislation to the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. "It was in this chamber a number of years ago that we knocked down the walls of discrimination on the basis of race, that we knocked down the walls of discrimination on the basis of religion ... national origin ... gender," Kennedy thundered. "We were part of the march for progress, and today we are called on again in that exact same way."

Republicans such as Jon Kyl and John McCain of Arizona (whose stand on immigration has dimmed his presidential prospects), Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Trent Lott of Mississippi withstood withering attacks from their home states.

Graham, Lott and Feinstein all insisted that the public did not understand the bill's unprecedented enforcement measures.

"The way the bill was spun was an amnesty bill, and everything out there was, 'No on amnesty,' " Feinstein said.

She described a daily pounding by talk radio that jammed Senate phones.

"About 20 percent of the population came alive, very strongly, against the bill," Feinstein said. "But every single poll -- and we watched them carefully to try to get a barometer -- showed a dominant majority of Americans favoring the bill, and a dominant majority of immigrants saying they would comply with the bill. And it didn't seem to make a difference."

Opponents said race was not the problem; post-Katrina government incompetence was.

Haunted by the failure of a 1986 amnesty that was never accompanied by worksite enforcement, the effort was suddenly stung by a passport fiasco disrupting summer travel. New requirements for North American travel -- backlogged by 3 million passports -- would have been dwarfed by the sweeping new worksite enforcement rules and millions of new visas envisioned by the immigration bill.

"We've had intelligence gaps," said Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. "We've had evolving reasons as to why we're involved in military conflicts. We've see what's happened ... on things like Katrina. We have ministers that want to go on mission trips today but cannot get passports renewed. This is about competence. It is about credibility."

Americans, he said, feel they are losing their country not "to people who speak differently ... or are from different backgrounds. They're losing it to a government that (seems) not to have the competence or the ability to carry out the things that it says it will do."

Since the 1960s, big immigration bills have gotten their political fuel from an unstable coalition of business, ethnic groups and some unions. This time, each of these factions began splintering as soon as the bill was announced.

Unions split between those who see immigrants as a threat to wages and those who see them as a recruiting pool. Business criticized the bills as inadequate or unworkable. Immigrant groups divided between those who saw the measure as too punitive and anti-family, and those who wanted to keep legalization alive.

President Bush threw extraordinary effort behind passage, making personal appeals up to the moment of the bill's collapse. But with his sway over his party sucked dry by the Iraq war, Republicans felt free to abandon him.

Efforts will be made to revive pieces of the wreckage -- from a legalization program for farmworkers to more H-1B temporary visas for high-tech workers. Conservatives will press for more enforcement.

Whether any of that can pass now is an open question. But more than a decade of tougher border controls have not stopped the largest immigration flow to the United States since the turn of the 20th century. Global economic and demographic forces promise to increase, not reduce, the pressure for millions more to seek and find work in the United States in decades to come.